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Applications engineer Katy Ashby explains that simulation has the potential to encourage growth in the additive manufacturing industry by helping companies move away from empirical testing that is both costly and time consuming.

AMT—The Association For Manufacturing Technology, as a service to its members, participates in researching,compiling and disseminating market intelligence within the manufacturing technology sector. The next step in this endeavor is Tech Trends, an initial document created by AMT to better support awareness of current and trending manufacturing technologies.

The Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory is partnering with machine tool manufacturer Cincinnati Inc. to develop a large-scale additive manufacturing system capable of printing polymer components as much as 10 times larger than can currently be produced and at speeds 200 to 500 times faster than existing AM machines.

There is an abundance of media outlets that speak to additive manufacturing (AM)/3D printing (3DP) as an inherent enabler to the manufacturing industry. However, there are also enablers for AM to be fully realized and more pervasively accepted. If one could draw a path from today's capabilities to what AM is being touted as providing tomorrow, you could identify both obstacles and enablers. That discussion space could be divided into three areas: materials, processing and economics.

One of the most important sites in the United States for advancing industry's understanding of additive manufacturing belongs to an institution once associated with the atomic bomb. In Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the Manufacturing Demonstation Facility (MDF) - part of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) - is using resources as sophisticated as a $1.4 billion neutron source to examine the material structure of parts produced through direct metal laser sintering, or through electron beam melting performed on the facility's own Arcam machines.